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Maxi Gamer Xentor 32
Page 8
The Xentor 32 delivers 30fps DVD support, true or false?
That is what I read on my Press file here @ the PlayDevil Test Office.
It says: "High Quality 30fps Hardware-Assisted DVD playback with TV-Out". Unfortunately right now, we don't have a DVD-drive available in our office and no one from the outside PlayDevil team has such a drive too. So basically we couldn't test the software DVD-video acceleration support on this card.
But in the following month, we should recieve a DVD kit. Then, we might consider to update this review with our thoughts on the Xentor 32 software DVD support.
But for now, here are Guillemot's Maxi Gamer Xentor 32 DVD features:- 30fps full-screen DVD playback
- High quality color resolution
- True bilinear filtering implementation for scaled video
- Compensation for filtering losses
- DVD sub-picture alpha blending composition
- Backend hardware video scaling for video playback
- Hardware color space conversion (YUV 4:2:0 and 4:2:2)
- Planar YUV 4:2:0 and 4:2:2 conversion for software MPEG acceleration
- Multiple video windows with hardware color space conversion and filtering
- Per-pixel color keying
- Support for scaled field interframing to reduce motion artifacts
- Multi-tap X and Y filtering
If you do have a DVD drive, you'll be pleased that Guillemot has bundled the XingDVD software decoder with their new line of TNT2 cards.
I have already read some reviews of this software DVD player and I must say, most of them were all very positive.
But, Voodoo3 is still faster?
Perhaps. The high-end card from 3dfx, the Voodoo 3500 might go a bit faster with several games, especially with Glide based games, than this high-clocked Ultra TNT2 card from Guillemot but the disadvantages that the V3 has is absolutely a definitely
miss for calling the V3 a next-generation chip.
If you are still thinking what kind of video card, the V3 or the TNT2 you'll be buying, let me sum the disadvantages up of the Voodoo 3 family:- Only 16 Mb on-board Ram
- No 32-bit rendering
- No 32-bit textures
- No real AGP Texturing
- Limited texture size 256x256
Of course you may think, 'there aren't really games that supports all these kind of features of the TNT2'.
Well, wrong. There are already plenty of games that supports 32-bit rendering and 32-bit textures and upcoming games such as 'Unreal Tournament', 'Quake III: Arena' and many others will have support for larger textures than 3dfx's 256x256 and then, if you have a V3 with only 16-bit Ram you'll be forced to play games in a lower resolution then your friends with their (U)-TNT2 based cards.
Don't get me wrong here, the Voodoo 3 family isn't a bad 2D/3D card but it is definitely not 'a next-generation card' if you ask me. Sorry 3dfx.
And for the gamers that are thinking that there is absolutely no difference between 16- and 32-bit rendering I can tell you that, in the interview that we did with Rage's Software Project Manager Julian Widdows (which can be read here), he told us that when you use 32-bit textures and 32-bit rendering, that you can CLEARLY see a difference between the two rendering formats.
And that is an opinion from someone that is working for a developing firm.
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